Wednesday, February 25, 2009

No local newspaper - News-Mirror, Press-Enterprise, or Sun - has contacted any person in YCEA for information on the budget crisis and related issues. Every quote we see in the paper is from a District administrator or school board member.

It is irresponsible reporting to NOT get both sides of a story, and even more irresponsible to get a huge part of a story WRONG.

The first example is the Yucaipa News-Mirror's article from two weeks ago, which stated that YCEA supported the elimination of Class Size Reduction - and misstated it twice in the same article. As a matter of fact, SAVING Class Size Reduction was our #2 item on the list, after our proposal to reconfigure elementary school boundaries and eliminate elementary APs (one item). YCEA wrote a letter to the News-Mirror pointing out the error and requesting a correction, but so far nothing has been published correcting this error. Had reporter Bill Brown contacted YCEA for input, which would be fair and impartial journalism, then this glaring error would not have been printed.

Second, the Press-Enterprise quoted school board member Sue Brown: " 'The district's management team will take five furlough days, and cuts are being made in district office administration,' Brown said." Excuse me? There are NO cuts being made in district office administration! They converted two accountant positions into one in the business office, and didn't rehire a clerk position in human resources. But NO administrator has been let go or reassigned. Not only is Ms. Brown misrepresenting the facts, had a reporter from the Press-Enterprise contacted YCEA for input, which would be fair and impartial journalism, then this glaring error would not have been printed.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

The authors of this blog respectfully request that the nasty, personal comments stop. We will not publish them. Not only are they contrary to the point of this blog, they are misinformed. We'll give three examples:

1) The board did NOT make a choice between "saving" Dunlap and saving CSR. There isn't an "either-or" choice to be made, by either the board OR the negotiations team. The board merely pulled the Dunlap decision from consideration that week, delaying it until the next meeting. Then, because of the layoff timeline, it voted to approve the administration's cost-cutting recommendations. It did this just in case an agreement of any kind could not be met with the Association in time for the RiF notices. The YCEA negotiations team continues to work to save all possible jobs.

2) You cannot offer to take more kids in your classes in order to save jobs. Taking more kids into your class eliminates jobs. We HAVE to keep CSR classes at 20:1 in order to keep all of our members.

3) Two, possibly four jobs are subject to elimination if the closure of Dunlap is approved. Yes, many Dunlap members and parents are concerned about other issues related to Dunlap, but our priority in this matter has got to be the jobs.

Friday, February 6, 2009

In total disregard to the First Amendment the district has sent a letter home to Dunlap parents informing them that public comments regarding the proposed closing of Dunlap will be severely limited or possibly not permitted at the February 10 board meeting -- the same meeting where the board will be voting on closing Dunlap.